Show HN: picoCDN, file hosting for developers

picocdn.com

2 points·jgillich··3 comments

FYI, I built this for a use case I often have: I want to build a small HTML5 demo in JSFiddle, but one of the scripts I would like to use is not available on any CDN. Sure I could just link to GitHub, but since they don't set content-type correctly, it won't work in IE. picoCDN is perfect for that: paste the script, check uglify and raw, copy url, done.

Its language detection is a bit wonky right now and there are mainly plugins for web development related stuff; if you don't have anything lying around, here is where you get after pasting jQuery: http://picocdn.com/0fe3e567e0/

It's currently running on a $5 Digital Ocean box (with unlimited traffic :), depending on how popular it gets I might need to upgrade it soon. Especially the plugins use a lot of CPU, but after the first hit Varnish is able to serve an insane amount of requests per second.

I'm not sure I understand the use case. You're offering file hosting on a $5 DO box (which may get upgraded). That would probably be too unreliable for most professional cases, and also it's not a CDN. However, AWS and others offer real CDNs, and at an extremely low cost. Why wouldn't I just use CloudFront if I wanted to host a file that isn't on any CDN? No disrespect intended - I may have misunderstood the purpose.

It's for use cases where performance and reliability don't matter, like quick demos. The reason for using it and not CloudFront could be that you don't need an account and it's free. It's also faster and easier to use than any alternative I know (like uploading to your own server).

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